An investigation into the relationship of heuristic performance with network-resource characteristics

Abstract

Constrained resource project management heuristics are analyzed and their performance is assessed related to well defined project types. Such results have shown that using the overall performance measure of a given heuristic can, in some situations, be misleading.

An efficient heuristic, which combines resource and criticality factors is also proposed. Computational experiments on a set of 6120 networks varying in size from 45–666 activities, 3 resources, and under different network parameters are reported. The proposed heuristic outperforms the best existing dispatching rules in certain project classes and also on problem sets appearing in the literature.